How do we identify the Business Processes?

If we are working from the mission to identify processes we would go through the following sequence of steps:

Ask what is the organization trying to do (right now) and thereby define the Mission

Ask for whom is the organization doing it and thereby define the Stakeholders

Ask what the stakeholder's needs and expectations are relative to the mission and thereby define the required Business Outcomes. (See Stakeholder Analysis for typical outcomes).

Ask what will the stakeholders look for to assess if their needs and expectations have been met and thereby define the Stakeholder success measures or KPIs (See Stakeholder Analysis for typical KPIs).

Ask what outputs will deliver successful outcomes and thereby define the Business Outputs

Ask what factors affect our ability to deliver these outputs and thereby define the Critical Success Factors. From these one may be able to identify business objectives, constraints and key sub-processes. E.g if innovation is critical there ought be an innovation objective and an innovation process to achieve this objective. If a constraint is that we must minimise our carbon footprint, the innovation process has to enable the innovation objective to be achieved while reducing our carbon footprint.

Ask in what area are we going to concentrate our resources, which segment of the market, with what products, what services and with what values are we going to be the leader and thereby define more constraints such as the priorities, policies and values.

Ask “what processes will deliver these business outputs with these imposed constraints” and thereby define the critical processes. This may result in identifying many processes such as sales, marketing, innovation etc rather than generic business processes

To identify the generic business processes ask “what contribution do these critical processes make to the business” and thereby define the Business Processes and their associated sub- processes (See table below for typical example)

AQPC

Cat

AQPC Process Classification Framework(1)

(Main classifications)

Contribution

Business Process

1

Develop vision and strategy

These set the goals and enable us to achieve them

Mission Management

12

Manage knowledge, improvement and change

10

Manage environmental health and safety

11

Manage external relationships

2

Design and develop products and services

These create a demand

Demand Creation

3

Market and sell products and services

7

Produce and deliver for manufacturing

These fulfil a demand

Demand Fulfilment

4

Deliver products and services

5

Manage customer service

6

Develop and manage human capital

7

Manage information technology

These provide capable resources

Resource Management

8

Manage financial resources

9

Acquire, construct and manage property

This is the approach taken by Peter Drucker in the Practice of Management in which he wrote, "a business function is a collection of activities that make a common and unique contribution to the purpose and mission of the business." Drucker used the term function and not process but he was not referring to departments. As we derive business processes from the mission we can draw the conclusion that business function in Drucker's day = business process in today's parlance.

(1) From The American Quality and Productivity Centre Process Classification framework version 7 2015 .